Avahi is a zero-configuration networking system for discovering and publishing services and hosts on a local network.
It implements DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD) over Multicast DNS (mDNS), the same protocol family used by Apple Bonjour. Compatible devices and applications can therefore find one another without a centrally managed DNS server. The suite includes a system daemon, client libraries, command-line utilities, a GTK service browser, compatibility layers and IPv4 link-local configuration. Applications can use its D-Bus service or embed the lower-level avahi-core implementation. Avahi primarily targets Linux, with support for BSD systems and illumos.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Discovers printers, file shares, media services and other DNS-SD-advertised resources as they appear on the local network.
- Publishes host names, arbitrary records and services through mDNS, with probing and collision handling.
- Includes avahi-browse, avahi-resolve, avahi-publish and avahi-set-host-name command-line tools.
- Offers client and embedded core C APIs, together with D-Bus and GObject interfaces.
- Integrates with simple, threaded, GLib, Qt 5 and libevent main loops.
- Supplies a GTK-based service discovery dialog for graphical applications and standalone browsing.
- Provides compatibility interfaces for applications written for Bonjour’s libdns_sd API and HOWL.
- Supports IPv4, IPv6, multicast lookups, wide-area DNS and local-only services.
- Can reflect mDNS traffic between network interfaces, with filters controlling which queries are forwarded.
- Reads static XML service definitions, including textual and binary TXT record values.
- Includes avahi-autoipd for automatic IPv4 link-local address allocation when DHCP is unavailable.
Website: github.com/avahi/avahi
Support:
Developer: Avahi developers
License: GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
Avahi is written primarily in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Service Discovery | |
|---|---|
| etcd | Distributed reliable key-value store |
| Consul | Offers service discovery, service mesh, traffic management, and more |
| Nacos | Dynamic service discovery, configuration management, and service governance |
| Eureka | RESTful (Representational State Transfer) service |
| Serf | Decentralized membership, failure detection and orchestration |
| ZooKeeper | Centralized service for maintaining configuration information |
| Avahi | Implements zero-configuration networking using mDNS/DNS-SD |
| dnsdock | DNS server for automatic docker container discovery |
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